Oakland Tribune editorial: Christopher Miller deserves a very long stay in confinement

Christopher Miller must go to jail and it should be for a very long time.

After reading a weekend article by the Bay Area News Group's Matthias Gafni about the convicted pedophile's manipulation of the legal system, we became convinced that serious prison time is the only possible outcome that justice can accommodate.

To be sure, this fellow needs serious psychological help, but the time for getting it outside of the walls of state prison has passed. He must finally be held to answer for his horrendous crimes by serving a lengthy jail term.

For those who may have missed it, Miller is a con man and serial pedophile who made deal after deal with prosecutors that allowed him to spend relatively little time in jail and, of course, to molest more helpless children.

But it doesn't stop there.

According to Gafni's story, Miller isn't just your run-of-the-mill pedophile, if there is such a thing. He would target specific children who had mothers who were vulnerable. He then would romance and charm the mothers, eventually marrying them, just to get unfettered access to her child.

Grotesque doesn't even begin to describe the actions of this sociopath who bobbed and weaved his way through the justice system for more than 20 years, all the while taking advantage of it and his victims.

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It was the 42-year-old's style to cooperate with a law enforcement investigation once he was caught. He would broker plea deals to give up much bigger fish in exchange for reduced sentences. He also made sure to discourage victims and family members from testifying, which helped him avoid more serious charges. And he benefited from California's sentencing standards for crimes deemed neither "violent" nor "serious." We will save comment on that issue for another time.

Much of Miller's criminal activity was conducted in Southern California, but in 2009 he moved to Bay Point, where he repeatedly molested an 11-year-old boy.

Ironically, Miller was caught through the same means he had used so successfully: Another offender had agreed to become a police informant in exchange for a lesser sentence.

Now it would seem that Miller is finally out of deals. He was convicted by a Contra Costa County jury in May on 29 counts of child molestation charges as well as on a child pornography count. The jury deliberated only about three hours to reach its decision.

Miller is scheduled to be sentenced Friday. He could receive a sentence of more than 69 years in prison.

It seems to us that he has done all he could do to earn such a sentence. As we said, Christopher Miller must go to jail for a very long time.